New Delhi, June 13 -- There are certain films that leave you thinking long after the credits roll. Then there are films that leave you feeling as though something has fundamentally shifted inside you. Disclosure Day belongs firmly in the latter category.

Steven Spielberg's latest science-fiction thriller arrives carrying enormous expectations. After all, this is the filmmaker who gave cinema some of its defining encounters with the unknown, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to ET. Yet Disclosure Day feels neither nostalgic nor self-referential. Instead, it is a mature, deeply thoughtful work that explores what humanity might do when confronted with something beyond its understanding.

What impressed me most was the film's confidenc...